June 05, 2008

Managing Around the Seams

I had lunch with Larry Tunks, CIO at Congressional Quarterly, the other day, and he spoke about how he has been trying to simplify and integrate his organization's technology platform. He talked about one of the greatest challenges he's faced, which he calls "managing around the seams." Systems today, he noted, often require scripts and other 'middleware' to interoperate. When any of those interstitial integrations fails, it can bring down a whole system.

It occurred to me that one of the many jobs a good CIO needs to tackle is the elimination of those 'seams.' We often hear product vendors in the marketplace use the term 'seamlessly integrate,' but I always counsel my customers to look deeper under the hood. What exactly does 'seamless' mean? Integration of different systems through API-to-API? That requires specialized knowledge of those APIs, which creates a dependency on an integration firm or the product vendors themselves. Or, it creates a situation where the company needs to keep specialized development resources on staff to manage those integrations.

Similarly, although perhaps a little bit better, is integration via Web services -- but that too creates some dependencies on vendors, integrators, or internal staff that need to be kept happy.

The situation is actually worse when 'seamless' means that the system will export delimited data that another system has to then import.

What we're seeing in the marketplace is that very few vendors are actually doing something about this state of affairs by pre-integrating technologies so that end users don't have to. So for instance, in the past you would see different Web content management systems, digital asset management systems, and workflow management systems 'seamlessly' integrated with export/import, API calls, or Web service calls, all at the expense of the customer. Now we are seeing vendors who are starting to deliver these systems pre-connected. Even better still, we are seeing companies deliver these solutions with a single repository where the content is stored.

Things are going in the right direction mostly, but I would have to say that I'd be much happier if organizations looked more carefully at the seams when they are trying to map technology to support business objectives. The shining bells and whistles of functionality in any of these technologies should not distract from looking at the level of effort -- if any -- required to integrate the different pieces to support those business goals.

Posted at 01:03 pm by Joseph Bachana

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